How To Fix Nuclear Escalation - My Short Thesis

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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I would like to preface this with I enjoy Nuclear Escalation. It’s a hell of a step up from Air RB, but it’s bleeding interest rapidly and needs Gaijin to show that they’re listening to feedback before the playerbase of it vanishes completely. Figures I quote are just from Google - they do not need to be precise here, they just need to get the point across.

Nuclear Escalation is a fundamentally good gamemode, but its biggest problem is not that the AA feels overpowered, or that its rewards are too low - though I’m not denying those are problems. I think it suffers most from having machines of war fighting in circumstances that do not realistically reflect the environment in which they would be employed.

I’ll talk about top tier here, as I feel that is where these problems are most prevalent. That does not mean they are not applicable to lower battle ratings. I am ordering my points in what I perceive to be the most important. You may (and should) disagree - I am not a magic machine that can summarize (or even understand) the views of the entire playerbase. I am just one player.

Distances
Just looking at the map, the distance between friendly airfields is ~50km. Whilst on paper that may seem okay, that is an abysmal distance. The distance from the nearest frontline unit to the airfields are just over half of that distance, with the actual “no man’s land” of the frontlines being only ~8km. If we discount kills from the Ukraine war (which we shouldn’t, given these are stationary hardpoints) that places the tanks within a few minutes drive of being able to engage one another. That is far too close.
Proposed fix:
Move the frontline back. Like, double the distance back. Move the airfields back a touch if necessary, but 8km distance between the furthest forward friendly & enemy units is not enough. At all.

SAMs (generalized)
As one example, Ito-90Ms are ~$12 million apiece (2S6 costs more). According to the map design, the blues spend ~$36 million per depot protecting 6 depots. That’s ~$216 million dollars on their frontline, approximately 12km away from the nearest enemy strongpoint. Seriously?
Proposed fix:
Either move vehicle production further back and replace these depots with garrisons that are actually fighting a conflict, or replace the SPAA.

Only 3 ground target types
You can either target convoys, long range SAMs or depots. Where is the actual war fighting assets? Where are the command and control positions? Where is the ability to disrupt enemy communications? Where are the power generation facilities for these depots?
Proposed fix:
Give us something to use bunker busters on. Let us make the rounds more dynamic by disrupting communications. For aircraft that have access to GBU-10s and GBU-24s, it’s a purely cosmetic difference and has no terminal impact. In a gamemode that is supposed to be a nuclear confrontation, that feels wrong.

Long Range SAMs
Enemy long range SAMs sit ~40km from the nearest airfield. The S-300 has a range of 200km. The SAMP/T has a range of 100km. They are sitting less than half their engagement distance away. ARH missiles are an option for eliminating these, but without EW/Jammers, it is simply not possible to get close enough to them to use the ARH missiles in their realistic distances. Real world strategies should not be applied for eliminating targets like these when we do not have real world technologies that are instrumental in those tactics.
Proposed fix:
If these SAMs won’t be moved further back, there needs to be more options for getting closer to them. Jammers are sorely missing from this mode.

Conclusion
I think Gaijin do truly care about this gamemode, but I do not think that they are communicating their long term intentions on making the mode more fun for players. Adding helicopters, cargo aircraft and such are all very well and good (and I would welcome them, for one), but people need to want to actually play your gamemode for the amount of development time these things take to have any sort of payoff.

I would like to call for a direct response to this post from Gaijin. Whilst I appreciate there may be internal discussions happening about the direction of this mode, the players have had radio silence when it comes to how Gaijin are listening to our feedback and improving the quality of life in the gamemode rather than just adding shiny new things that take more development time for less impact. If Gaijin want us to engage in the long term vision for the mode, the short term needs to be made better.

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This mode won’t ever be good as long as there are the niche nukes in and it’s balanced with that in mind.
That’s the major problem. Everything is set around the nukes.
And everything else gets crap because of that.
Why the AAA don’t kill the nuke bomb , but kill an Mk81?
There is no answer to that that is legit and valid other that they designed with that in mind. As long this exist, the mode is doomed.

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why would you want AA to be more powerful and kill nukes? and its called nuclear escalation its supposed to have nukes

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I don’t… but i’m telling this to showcase how much BS it is. You can’t balance it around that factor alone and they do just that.

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Why? What does this achieve? The current ground forces already take too long to accomplish anything to the point when they do make progress it just gets flattened by a 5kt warhead.

I mean, in most cases the aircraft are even more expensive so idk

the least they could do is stop all convoys spawining with SPAA (like the fuel trucks driving around in the backline) to help mitigate the sheer volume of SHORADs.

They’re already poor anyway

I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve beyond spacing out the combat zone and adding EW, creating a safespace for fighters to have another ARB style furball.

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16km is absolutely not a safe space. That’s well within the engagement distance of the SAMP/T & S300, and only gives 6km of room before you are being shot at by AA again.

Sure, if you’ve got a team that has ARH missiles that can kill them from their airfields. Half the teams I play on either do not have those, or simply do not use them.

What? Reducing backline SHORADs would just make it even easier to get to enemy airfields once you break through the frontline…

The current ground forces take too long to accomplish anything because nobody is really killing convoys because they’re getting beamed by AA from depots that are far too close whilst also having to defend from the AA on the convoys.

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S-300 can be defeated by a few seconds of notching (it’s a SARH missile that can’t relock like a 27ER) and the SAMP/T can be kinematically defeated by doing anything except flying at the missile. The only value they provide is filtering ppl who are new to NE, turning your RWR/MAW into obnoxious noise and making it so a nuke carrier can’t just fly at 9km and nuke your AF for free.

Which never happens and backline bases have AA anyway.

Convoys can breakthrough without CAS, ground pounding is also the easiest method of boosting Score/SP/Escalation Level so nukes will start flying regardless. Just because you can’t ground strike doesn’t mean nobody is doing it.

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Then remove them outright if they’re so useless according to you.

Yes, it does. I’ve seen it happen (and done SEAD to enable it) plenty of times.

lol

lmao, even

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go off queen 💁‍♀️

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If Gaijin still doesn’t fix this, then any improvement doesn’t work; Gaijin doesn’t even admit that it’s a bug.

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Until the AAA and SAMs all get lobotomized, I have little to no interest in bothering to play the BR of jets even able to queue for Nuclear Escalation. Playing the original April Fools version told me everything I needed to know. It’s a mode that looks like it wants to be more than Dumb Fucking Deathmatch, but the AAA and SAMs are so overtuned that it requires saturation bombardments to kill them. Which means the vast majority of weapons on modern multirole jets are still useless as the weapons all get shot down.

But I broadly agree upon reading the opening post that the map is too damn small. PvP should NOT be the point of a mode like that, but rather an occasional afterthought. The actual point of most aerial warfare is to blow stuff up on the ground. But the AAA and SAMs effortlessly intercepting everything even without radars deployed means you frequently can’t do jack shit to the ground units under their envelope. Which leaves playing just a worse Team Deathmatch with infinite respawns until one side just gives up.

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Perhaps opening the frontlines just a bit and reduce the frequency of ITOs and replace a lot of them with MANPAD sites? They’re already in the game.

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Btw , read. That was 1 year before the “Event” appeared.
Let’s say they’ve read an idea and they just added the nukes…And made it worse…

Edit: a similar one from 2023.

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My issues with NE:

  • Unrealistic aim bot SPPA…like making them unrealistic is not how you make game more difficult to be fun.
  • Only specific palnes can be played to not end up playing 40 min just to lose 50k SL
  • Some planes dont have ground ordinance, plase then make a part of map where people can dogfight.
  • Please make game mode WORTHY for players who dont habe premiums or premium time.
  • Please add some missions monthly and weekly
  • make nuke spawn 4 times more points
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In my experience a lot of the dogfighting happens in the third act along the coastal airbases.

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I recently decided to give this game mode a try, and it’s great, but Gaijin really needs to work on AA—it can shoot down almost all the gliding bombs we send at it, and even light armored vehicles can hit us from a distance of 3–4 kilometers. The anti-air defense is a bit too strong, especially at the highest tiers.

Another issue is being matched into battles that are almost over. Yes, yesterday matchmaking placed me three times in battles where both teams had around ~400–800 points. Great—five minutes of play and a loss (I ended up on the losing team twice) :)

Another issue is the number of maps—it would be nice to have at least three available today; we only have one… That’s definitely not enough.

In short, this mode is awesome, and Snail should focus all its development efforts on it—it feels like a breath of fresh air.

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Playing Nuclear Escalation would be so much more bearable, if Units that have been spotted once would just remain spotted, even if it’s on a “Last seen at…” Basis. it’s really annoying that these “short” Range SPAAs and SAMs get spotted only after they already launched two Missiles at you, while operating on Frequencies not covered by some RWR Systems

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I love this game mode and I play ARB solely for the purpose of unlocking aircraft and modules to play in NE. I used to seldom play any air modes until this came along.

Personally I think a major part of the issue with the game mode are how the air defenses are too tightly overlapping. Everyone hugs the deck because of the long range SAMs constantly saturating the area and how quickly (and without warning) the SHORADs will engage. The detection and engagement ranges of the SHORADs could easily be reduced and the long range SAMs moved further back. My wish is there was a larger no-man’s zone both laterally and vertically where PvP contests the airspace the most.

I mostly play 10.0-11.3 BRs and the lopsidedness between red and blue is pretty apparent. To kill a long range redfor SAM, you need to kill 3 targets, and if you kill a BUK TEL, you’ve reduced its effectiveness by 50%. Conversely, a bluefor SAM site has THREE independent track radars and a search radar that needs killing. Compounding the issue is the limited fire and forget munitions that redfor (soviet) aircraft carry (not to mention the AV-8B NA is at 11.3 with flippin JSOWs).

If I want to make lions, I go play bluefor and enjoy the ezmode. If I want a challenge, I play Soviet. I would love to see the BRs rebalanced a little to account for this, or go back to BR bracketing.

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Absolutely. That’s my biggest gripe with it - not the quantity, but just how many are overlapping.

I liked bracketing whenever I wasn’t using 14.0s. The overlap resulted in 50% of my games in the F-15E getting uptiered, which was a huge pain when trying to play with friends who wanted to use 13.7s.

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Man. What the fuck. How is anyone able to reasonably attack enemy targets that are literally driving past friendlies while staying a safe enough distance away to not get shot down???

This is absolutely ridiculous and is exactly what I mean by the distances need to be increased.

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Welp, screw A-10 players ig